Another vintage title that adds to the diversity of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image’s season on Hong Kong screen star Linda Lin Dai, Les Belles is the kind of gloriously bright musical where one character writes a note to another before they’re meant to meet for the first time, saying that, 'I’ll wear a pink dress, with a pink umbrella." You may wonder, once you’re immersed in the picture’s aesthetic, how she could hope to distinguish herself – pink is a primary colour in this carefree milieu.
Lan Lan (Linda Lin Dai) and Mei Mei (Fanny Fan) are lead dancers in a Hong Kong stage revue that’s heading for bankruptcy. When the proprietors flee he leaves them with a letter of introduction to his rival, and a fair warning: 'She is a tough lady". The wonderfully named Chief Ma (Kao Pah-shu) hires the pair after a comic audition of raised eyebrows and deft hand gestures, and they move into her boarding school for adults, deliriously designed dormitories where the female and male performers rehearse all day, appear before the public at night and then scamper about in pajamas before bed passing notes from one floor to the next by bucket and rope.
Director Ching Doe tracks along the balcony line, taking in each bedroom as a G-rated escapist tableau – the young men and women are not even permitted to talk to each other under Chief Ma’s strict contract, but romance is the only delight the film considers capable of matching the numerous song and dance scenes (three separate numbers alone are excerpted for the opening credits). And if the movement is easy, then the romance must be difficult. Lan Lan repeatedly clashes with Ma’s choreographer songwriter, Ma Yin (Peter Chen Ho), and for their mutual antagonism to be spoiled by each of them falling in love with the letters the other one writes through a newspaper’s singles service.
This affectionate borrow from Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner allows for mistaken identity and the sudden shock of recognition. The assignation to meet finds each writer sending a surrogate in their place, so they can watch from nearby and decide if they approve of their opposite number. This kind of musical farce is catnip to Lin Dai, who knows how to charmingly burst through a door with a wide smile and a mischievous pronouncement, although opposite her Peter Chen Ho is somewhat limited; he’s a little too convincing in his outwardly stern public persona.
Once the company tours Japan, with a show that gets around the world in 80 ways thanks to national-themed set-pieces that run from the can-can to imperial court princesses, the stage numbers are profuse, although they lack a certain variety. Ya Min’s repertoire is surprisingly democratic, without a show stopper for either Lan Lan or Linda Lin Dai to enjoy. Thankfully the Cinemascope format – shot as 'Shaw Scope", courtesy of the movie’s producer, the Shaw Brothers Studio – has no problem taking in the troupe’s choreography. It’s even almost wide enough to accommodate the giddy playfulness that dominates Les Belles.
